Fuck You, Leftists: A Selection from David Frum’s Trumpocracy (2018)

“Through the Obama years, conservatives had reinvented themselves as ‘constitutionalists’: upholders of law against arbitrary executive power. Ted Cruz even wrote the foreword to a book accusing the Obama administration of unprecedented lawlessness. But that was then. The Arpaio pardon generated paroxysms of enthusiasm in the conservative base. A popular columnist for the conservative site Townhall tweeted to his 115,000 followers a pithy explanation of the justification for the about-face on arbitrary executive power: ‘The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, leftists. The new rules, bitches.’ followed by a smiling sunglasses-wearing emoji symbol. He made a cogent point too. By August 2017, what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond ‘fuck you, leftists’? . . .

Whatever else Trump may fail to do . . . there is one thing at which he never fails: provoking outrage among the people whom Trump supporters regard as overentitled and underdeserving . . . . Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment. He summons all those who share that resentment to buy a ticket and enjoy the show. The United States has seen many such characters before, of course. The Founding generation warned against them. . . . For more than two centuries, through more than fifty presidential elections, those warnings were heeded. This time, not. . . .

Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse. Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret. Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency. The best justice is reconciliation, urged Desmond Tutu as he chaired South Africa’s inquiry into its past. That was also the teaching of America’s greatest president too in the country’s most searing agony of trial. If Lincoln could say it then, we can in this so much less harrowing passage surely repeat: ‘Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.’”—David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018)